Sberbank is developing its IT infrastructure both using technologies and approaches that have already proven their effectiveness, and by considering and testing new ones. Sberbank Senior Vice President for IT Nikita Volkov told FutureBanking about the work to improve reliability and about laying the foundation for the “bank of the future” platform.
Sberbank's megadata center has already received its third certificate from the Uptime Institute. Typically, commercial data centers need such certification to attract customers. Why does Sberbank need this? Before the construction of the MegaData Center, the bank's management stated that in the future, perhaps, the bank would provide data center rental services to other clients. Aren't you preparing for this?Sberbank is a public company. The more reliable we are, the higher the share price. And by the way, the salaries of top managers of public companies often depend on the price of shares, and so does my income. Therefore, we are very interested in reliability and are happy to receive confirmation that we have it. In fact, only 11 organizations in the world are Uptime Institute Tier III Operations Gold certified, and about half of them have built data centers for their own needs.
Of course, we must be sure that our infrastructure is able to operate without failures. We have already received Tier III certifications for data center design and implementation. Now the bank has received confirmation that all our procedures and regulations comply with best practices, that is, the influence of the “human factor” in the process of operational management is minimal.
As for providing services to other banks, in fact, we already provide them. As you know, Sberbank has several subsidiary banks in other countries, and they use the services of our MegaData Center. By the way, the countries in which we operate have different regulatory rules, and some of them relate to reliability. So certification is also needed to confirm compliance with these rules.
What reliability indicators have you achieved?
For 2 years now, Sberbank has been implementing the so-called 99.99 Program. During this time, the total downtime of automated systems due to technological work and incidents was reduced by more than 6 times. The bank's critical systems are completely duplicated. The existing redundancy scheme allows for the restoration of systems in the event of failure of the main data center or its parts. The productivity of key systems has been increased more than 4 times. As a result of using a backup Stand-in mode, which allows us not to stop the operation of systems during technological work, we saved 255 hours of operation of key systems, of which 100 hours were Internet banking and 110 hours were processing. We are constantly improving the performance of our systems and planning for a year and a half ahead.
However, technology alone is not enough. We need an appropriate culture. At all levels in the bank, people must realize that reliability is something that must be kept in mind at all times.
So now you can say that long-term incidents similar to what happened in 2013, when clients were unable to use Sberbank cards for a long time, will not happen again?
That particular problem had been resolved before I joined the bank. It is impossible to say unequivocally that there will never be incidents. They may exist, but we strive to minimize the impact of the incident on the level of service for customers or to minimize this period. In general, we believe that various errors are possible - in operating systems, databases, hardware and communication failures, personnel errors, our developers, and testers. For us, a failure is not only the complete inoperability of the system, but also a significant drop in its performance (different parameters are used for different systems, but usually an incident is recorded when performance drops by 20-30%). Our main goal is not to ensure that there are no incidents at all, but to ensure that incidents are resolved without affecting customers.
What is your plan for the development of the data center system?
In the target scenario, we expect to have 3 data centers by 2019-2020. Now there are more than 16 of them in the regions and a Mega Data Center in Moscow. Although we are conducting a large-scale centralization program, some local systems in the regions still remain. Subsequently, we hope to leave only communication nodes in the regions.
In addition, we are currently renting 3 data centers in Moscow, because the existing capacities are not enough. But the construction of our second Mega Data Center in Skolkovo is already planned. We plan to build another, backup data center in the Urals.
What's happening to Sberbank's IT budget?
We recently adopted the IT budget for next year. I will not name the amount, because all banks calculate the IT budget differently, and discrepancies may arise. I can only say that our IT budget is growing by an average of 15% per year.
Sberbank Technologies recently took third place in the CNews ranking of the largest IT suppliers for banks in terms of project revenue, with growth over the year amounting to 48%. Why and will this trend continue?
Yes, the company will grow another 25-30% next year. I think it’s optimal to have a reasonable balance between development by “our own” and “outside” forces. The market needs competition and choice. In my opinion, Sberbank Technologies is already a fairly large company, which, with rapid growth, will become more and more difficult to manage effectively. Now she carries out almost 70% of Sberbank’s IT projects. This is a large share, and I consider it inappropriate to increase it.
Recently Lev Khasis said that Sberbank is going to join the R3 alliance. Are any concrete steps being taken towards using blockchain?
Yes, I like blockchain technology, it’s very beautiful. But I can’t say that I have any specific cases of how it can be used. We are looking at it, studying it, but its application is not in the very near future.
Is there aIs Sberbank IT something innovative?
I'll tell you a secret. We are building a completely new technology platform for the “bank of the future.” The bank's management understands that this is necessary and allocates all the necessary resources. The platform is based on grid and in-memory computing technologies. This is a fundamentally different architecture; lower-class servers are used there. Because the hardware we have now is the most powerful that exists on the market. And even it works to the limit.
Innovation sometimes conflicts with job stability because it interferes with stability. Therefore, Sberbank never strives to be the first in the field of introducing any new technologies. This was announced by the senior vice president of Sberbank for IT Nikita Volkov at a briefing on the preliminary results of the implementation of the program “Reliability of the Bank’s Automated Systems”, as well as the bank’s IT development strategy until 2018. The briefing took place on January 21, 2015. But the bank is trying to be second, because if at least some breakthrough technology appears somewhere that can significantly improve the situation in some sector of the market, then Sberbank introduces it into its work in 3-6 months, Volkov added.
As part of the IT development strategy until 2018, Sberbank will not abandon any of its projects. But some projects in 2015, according to Nikita Volkov, will be “calendarized,” that is, postponed to the following years. Thus, approximately 10% of the total budget for the development of IT technologies in the bank will be attributed to 2016 expenses.
“We looked at what projects could be postponed to next year, and found it possible to move several projects to 2016,” Volkov said. According to him, the same thing happened in a number of other areas, including construction, he added.
The bank is designing a second Data Processing Center (DPC), Nikita Volkov said. He noted that the design of the data center is currently underway. Skolkovo is one of the placement locations. But a concrete decision on the location and start of construction has not been received. Construction was planned to begin in 2016.
Sberbank already has one data center - “South Port”, which was launched on November 12, 2011. This project was called the largest banking data center in Eastern Europe. According to Volkov, Sberbank is a very large international structure, in fact an IT company with a banking license. The bank’s IT development strategy was adopted at the end of 2013, and since the beginning of its implementation, the bank’s performance has increased significantly. Thus, the bank’s single retail center serves more than 9.9 million clients and carries out more than 1.5 million transactions per day. The system for servicing clients from the small and medium-sized business sector employs more than 800 thousand active clients and processes more than 900 thousand documents per day, about 15 million active clients use the mobile bank, and more than 35 million SMS messages are sent per day. The bank also has a heavy load on processing, where more than 37 million transactions are made per day on 126 million cards issued by the bank.
Nikita Volkov also dwelled on those issues that could not be resolved in the area of the bank’s IT systems in 2014. The bank failed to manage complex program portfolios, build high-quality IT processes, and implement the reliability and scalability of critical systems. The strategic goals of Sberbank’s IT block for the period until 2018 will be maximum reliability, guaranteeing the availability of all IT services, and flexibility, ensuring the rapid introduction of products to the market by simplifying and standardizing technologies and business processes.
One of Sberbank’s key programs is the implementation of the “99.99” reliability program for the bank’s critical automated systems, the completion of which is scheduled for 2018. With an indicator of 99.99, the downtime of the bank’s IT systems is no more than 52 minutes per year. Now the bank’s reliability does not fall below the level of “99.5”. Current results of the program: the total downtime of the bank's critical systems has been reduced by four times, downtime during technological work has been reduced by 2.5 times, and the number of incidents in the systems has been reduced by 2.4 times.
“The new mission of the bank’s IT unit is to support Sberbank as an effective and reliable provider of traditional banking services, as well as a fast and innovative provider of new services and revolutionary business models - both inside and outside the banking sector,” said Nikita Volkov.
All bank systems have geo-reservation. In addition to the bank’s own data center, where the briefing took place, and plans to build its own second data center, two more leased data centers of the bank are currently operating. The bank processes 2 thousand transactions per second only in Russia. Any client’s request to an ATM when withdrawing money is confirmed in two data centers of the bank. If it happens that an emergency situation occurs in these two data centers at once, then the third data center comes into play, and the time to process the transaction takes 26 seconds, which, of course, goes unnoticed by the client.
In addition, Sberbank is studying the possibility of import substitution in the field of information technology, said the bank’s chief IT architect and its vice president Andrey Khlyzov.
“We are working on import substitution on a number of infrastructure elements. There is an alternative for database management systems, but they will not necessarily be Russian,” Khlyzov said. This is how he answered the question of whether Sberbank plans to abandon the developments of the American corporation Oracle.
According to Nikita Volkov, outside interference in the bank’s databases is impossible. “Under any scenario, no changes to our systems can be made from the outside without our control,” Volkov said. True, there are certain risks that foreign IT companies will refuse to support equipment already delivered to Russia. “This will dramatically increase the demands on our own team,” he added.
Andrey Khlyzov also said that the bank is working on creating a unified centralized IT platform for the bank called “Centralization 2.0”. The program lasts 4 years and employs 32 thousand people. The program currently applies only to the territory of Russia and has already reached payback. Thus, by 2015, none of the territorial banks of Sberbank had any disparate IT systems left - by the end of 2014, everything was transferred to a mega data center. The last to be transferred to the megadata centers were the data processing systems of the northeastern bank (Magadan, Chukotka and Yakutia), where communication channels in the national sense were generally poor, and the systems worked via satellite communications. “So, just one satellite was replaced by another,” noted Nikita Volkov.
At the same time, in December 2014, Sberbank recorded several simply collapsed days - in terms of the volume of demand for services, primarily for withdrawing money from cards. “But even these days, no cases critical for the bank or even very difficult from the point of view of IT systems were recorded,” Volkov said. True, these days have revealed the bank’s weaknesses - in some places it is communications, in others it is the relationship between systems (the so-called “bus”), in others it is the narrowness of communication channels. “December 2014 was a good test to check the performance of Sberbank,” said Nikita Volkov.
A new deputy chairman, Maxim Volkov, has been appointed to the Siberian Bank PJSC Sberbank. Now he oversees the Retail Business block. In an interviewStatus Maxim Volkov told why he doesn’t limit his career growth horizon and whether it’s possible to not be a workaholic while working at Sberbank.
- Sberbank is practically the only place of work in your career. How did this happen?
This is true. True, the first entry in my work book is not connected with Sberbank - I started working in a small company, but stayed there for only a few months. My entire career path, all my development took place at Sberbank. This year marks twenty years of my work in this structure.
How did this all happen? I was offered to participate in a competition for the position of “chief dealer of resource management of the Altai Bank.” I won this competition, despite the fact that out of five applicants I was the only candidate from the street without experience in a bank. For two days I read literature intensively, day and night. Knowledge of English helped, since information was not so accessible then, and I was able to demonstrate good awareness of current trends in the financial sector.
- How old were you then?
I was 24 years old.
- It turns out you started in the late nineties. Not the easiest time for the banking sector.
I came to work at the bank on August 13, 1998. And on Monday, August 17, there was a reboot of all banking and financial histories, in connection with the moratorium on repaying the external and internal debt of the Russian Federation. The dollar was rising, stocks and bonds were falling, and I had the position of chief dealer! By the way, there was a mistake on my ID; the word dealer was written with two letters “l” - almost like a killer. And it was fun to be the main dealer at a time when some markets practically ceased to exist.
The position was then renamed several times, the functionality changed, but, nevertheless, I worked in this direction for almost seven years. If you look at my computer screen, you will immediately understand that I still cannot live without it. I cannot exist without seeing all the main parameters of the financial market online.
Let's talk about career success. What achievements do you consider to be the most significant, and what preceded them?
Such a difficult question. With us, it doesn’t happen that a person works and works, develops and develops, and then suddenly success comes. At Sberbank we work every day for results that we will see much later. Relatively speaking, if we got an excellent result this quarter, it means we did a good job a year ago. This is a long chain of correct decisions that were made by people in different positions, in different territories, and so on.
In answer to your question, I want to say that I have not had lightning-fast personnel changes in my career. I worked for a long time in each position, came to certain results, and then moved on. I worked in the first position for seven years, in the second for five, then four years, and in the last for three - life accelerates.
If you want to develop and succeed, you need to be a workaholic. Successful people live in a mode of continuous self-development.
In a structure like Sberbank, is personalized success possible in principle, or is it always a team product?
Success here is always a one hundred percent team result. If something doesn’t work out, it means the command mechanism has not worked out. For me, a team is when people around me think the same way and speak the same language. It's an amazing feeling when your team works like clockwork. By the way, I consider such moments to be potentially dangerous - you start to calm down and lose your grip. Good team performance is a sign that something needs to change.
- What is most important for you when forming a team? How do you design it?
First, effective communication is very important. Secondly, a team certainly cannot be called a team if it does not have a goal. That is why in all previous stories I created a situation of overcoming some kind of crisis. First we say: “Guys, everything is bad with us,” then we look for a solution and generate a goal. If the team “buys” this story and accepts it, then the real work begins on the result without delay or shirking.
- Without weekends and holidays?
Sometimes it does.
- In general, is it possible to not be a workaholic while working at Sberbank?
No ( laughs). If you want to develop and succeed, then, of course, you need to be a workaholic. We exist in multitasking mode: everything around us is constantly changing and we need to catch up with this world every day. Successful people live in a mode of continuous self-development. Today it is a luxury to simply run on a treadmill - at this moment you need to watch or listen to something so that time does not go to waste. You can watch financial news in English on Bloomberg, listen to a book from the Sberbank library, or read something. Many things have to be “paralleled”, otherwise you won’t have time to do anything.
How do you find a balance between work and family in this rhythm, in this bustle? I know that you have three children. Do they have some kind of fixed, legal dad time?
There are no standards, no templates. Most of the time for family and hobbies is on weekends. I am a morning person, and getting up at four in the morning is a common thing for me. The family wakes up at nine. By this time, I have time to go fishing, hunting, and exercise, and the rest of the time is spent with the children.
- I know that you are running. At what point did you realize that you needed this?
In third grade, first physical education lesson. I remember we were long jumping, and I jumped three meters and sixty centimeters. That evening I was called to training, and I’ve been running ever since. To be honest, I feel pleasure when I realize that I am in good athletic shape. A belly hanging over a belt is a story of wild discomfort for me, although there was such a period in my life too. Today daily sport is my constant. If the weight goes down, I go to the gym, if it goes up, welcome to the treadmill.
This is the moment when you have to be tough and say: “Get up! It's time to go to the gym! In this sense, the “I”, internal and external, should also be a team working for results.
- You said that a team cannot exist without a goal. What tasks do you set for yourself? How complex are they?
If we are talking about a career, then over the years I have realized that there are no unattainable goals in this plane. I remember that once upon a time at the Altai Territorial Bank, the ultimate dream was the position of deputy chairman. In those days, vice-chairmen were literally demigods for me. And later I calmly stepped over this position. The only downside is that, having taken a position you never dreamed of, you find it difficult to set yourself the next goal.
- What exactly will happen here with your arrival? What will you do?
For me, the key things are business growth and increasing our efficiency. Different territories are different components of overall success. In some places it is a story of growth, in others it is a story of format changes and optimization. But in general, this is a strategy for growth in the market, involvement in all the changes that are taking place. The challenge is to be at the forefront of these changes. This can only be done with the right team committed to common goals. Today we are starting to introduce a number of fine adjustments in the retail business. In general terms, this is a strategy for growth, rapid and high-quality implementation of changes, new technologies and technological innovations.
I always tell myself and those people who think that everything is fine with them, that today’s point is not the point from which I want to retire. There's a lot more to come. My personal strategy: eat less and run more. By the way, it fits well with the topic of business. Today we need to generate less costs, consume less resources and run more after clients and results.
Julia Dorn
The Sberbank Cyber Security Service invites you to attend a series of events and learn from leading experts how theory is applied in practice ( https://sberbank-talents.ru/Info/cy... )
After reading smart books and taking many courses on information security and everything connected with it, the employee responsible for information security grows wings: he builds an ideal picture of the world in his head and, rolling up his sleeves, tries to “pull” it onto the object entrusted to him . But after a while it turns out that no one needs information security standards, “best practices” don’t actually work, highly relevant information security risks have not been realized for years, it’s easier to pay a fine for non-compliance with the law, and the information security employee himself is not at all an authority for other departments. This attitude cuts off the wings of an information security employee, he gives up, he becomes angry and all he is capable of is generating “sticks” for reporting to management. At the master class, you will learn how his leader went through all this, what mistakes he made and how he got out of difficult situations, what saved him from becoming a “stick generator” and how he managed to make information security an integral part of the business and life of employees in his company. No boring theory - just fun practice!
Dates: 10.12.2016
- who needs laws, standards and “best practices”? Three points of view: information security, IT and business;
- “Information security waste paper”: why doesn’t what you developed work?
- how to become an information security policymaker in an organization and why it is needed;
- separation of powers as the main stumbling block;
- information risk assessment: a process raised to the level of absurdity;
- classification of information assets and assessment of their value: dancing with a tambourine or real benefit?
- differentiation of access to information as a subject of fierce hatred on the part of “advanced businessmen”;
- personnel safety: we check potential ones, monitor current ones and fire “former” ones;
- increasing employee awareness in the field of information security, or how to organize fun holidays in kindergarten;
- “What are you paid for?” Performance indicators that satisfy everyone;
- “What to do if everything is done?” Professional degradation of an information security specialist, and how to avoid it.
Volkov Alexey Nikolaevich, Managing Director-Head of the Department of Information Security Standards and Processes of Sberbank
About the author: Graduated from the Cherepovets Military Engineering Institute of Radio Electronics with a degree in Radio Equipment. For most of his career he worked in the Severstal group of companies, where he most recently held the position of head of the information security equipment operation department of Severstal Management JSC. Married, has a son and daughter. Leads an active lifestyle, plays sports, loves to travel, and enjoys music. He has published 54 articles on professional topics, regularly gives reports and conducts master classes at specialized conferences. In 2014, he was recognized as the best leader in the field of information security according to the expert community Business Information Security Association and the Job.ru website.
David Rafalovsky headed the Technology block of Sberbank
Senior Vice President, CTO (chief technology officer) of Sberbank Group David Rafalovsky has been appointed head of the Technologies block. He will provide strategic management of the technology function of the Sberbank Group. ...
Nikita Volkov, senior vice president, co-head of the Technology block of Sberbank PJSC
"I believe that those who own the information still own the world, and working with information means analyzing data. The more historical data, the longer we have the opportunity to accumulate it, process it, analyze it and build models, the better we will feel themselves in the market, and the decisions made will be of better quality. This applies to absolutely all areas of business. Those involved in customer service will be able to better understand their client and his needs, offer the most popular products and services. Manufacturing enterprises, through the use of data, will be able to significantly reduce your costs, anticipate trends and make decisions in real time. This is truly a revolution, and I believe that the main distinguishing feature of today is the ability to work with data." ...
Huawei and Sberbank for joint innovations
Huawei and Sberbank signed an agreement on cooperation in the development of information and communication technologies based on Huawei OpenLab and their further implementation in the banking industry. ...
Andrey Khlyzov headed Sberbank Technologies
As Senior Vice President of Sberbank - General Director of Sberbank Technologies, Andrey Khlyzov replaced Alisa Melnikova, who left the bank. Andrey Khlyzov himself has been working at Sberbank for 20 years, holding various positions, in particular he was the chief IT architect at the bank. ...
Bart Shlatman is transforming Sberbank
The chief operating officer of the Dutch division of the ING group, Bart Schlatman, has been appointed to the post of senior vice president for transformation of Sberbank PJSC. This is a new position in the bank. In this position, Bart Schlatman will be responsible for implementing the omnichannel customer service model. In particular, for the introduction of a number of technology platforms. ...
Sberbank appointed chief technology officer
On February 15, 2017, Vadim Kulik will leave the post of Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank PJSC. In this position, he supervised and coordinated the work of two blocks of the bank, one of which was the Technology block. Senior Vice President of Sberbank Nikita Volkov has already been appointed acting head of this block. ...
